Contents

The Global Citizen Festival is part of a movement to end extreme poverty. By contributing to charity acts on the website, including watching videos and signing petitions, fans can get free tickets to the festival. In addition, the organizers are striving to make the event "global" by live-streaming events in public locations. Since 2015, the goals of the festival have been closely aligned with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which include 17 tasks to end extreme global poverty by 2030.[2]

According to Time, Global Citizen's model of ticket distribution in 2017 generated 1.6 million actions in two months, equaling commitments and announcements of $3.2 billion for sustainable development and affecting 221 million people.[3][5]

Co-founder Ryan Gall created the Global Citizen Festival when he met festival co-founder Hugh Evans at Columbia University at a conference and proposed the idea of holding a festival on the Great Lawn of Central Park. The pair later approached concert promoter Goldenvoice to launch the festival in 2012.[6][3]

Gall says the inspiration for the festival came from visiting Austin City Limits and seeing the branding on each stage but replacing corporate branding with branding from charities.[4] Tickets to the festival are distributed through a lottery system with festival-goers performing actions on Global Citizen's website, globalcitizen.org (which Gall co-founded), for a chance to attend the event.[7] The festival has taken its model to Australia, India, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium and Canada and is one of the largest, most visible events drawing attention to sustainability and anti-poverty efforts for young people around the world.[4]

The Johannesburg show was marred by violence as many concertgoers were robbed and assaulted outside the venue by armed attackers, allegedly due to a total lack of police and security presence. Twitter users reported that SAPS had not given them the help they needed though they were asked multiple times. It caused an a debate whether the festival should have had more security or lack of help from the security and SAPS.[29]